This company was registered in 1926, with £50,000 ordinary shares and £300,000 preference shares.  It occupied Fitzwilliam Works (formerly Sheffield Simplex Motor Car Works) in Sheffield Road, Tinsley.  Amidst much publicity, the company launched the mass production of safety razors in Sheffield.  Its managing director was Paul Richard Kuehnrich (1871-1932), one of the most colourful characters in Sheffield industry.  He had been born in Saxony on 26 January 1871 (the year when that region became part of Germany).  Kuehnrich may have been born in Leipzig, where his father, Robert, lived.  After working at his uncle’s steel business, Paul Kuehnrich arrived in Sheffield at the age of seventeen.   By 1889, he was working for Marsh Bros as a salesman and soon reinvigorated this traditional business.  By 1894, he was the manager of the company’s Pond Works.  In that year, he became naturalised.   Within ten years, however, Kuehnrich had left Marsh Bros after an acrimonious dispute.  He acquired an old manufacturer of die stamps, Darwin & Milner, which he used as a ‘name’ to make his fortune as a tool steel maker.  In 1903, he appointed Austrian-born Victor F. J. Tlach (1872-1954) as his managing-director.  By 1914, Tlach had left for America, where he became Darwin & Milner’s New York tool steel agent.

Kuehnrich and his family became wealthy.  In 1891, at the registrar’s office in Sharrow he had married Elise née Buch, who had been born in Neustadt, Germany.  They and their two daughters, Gertrude and Margot, lived at Ranmoor.  In 1910, when Kuehnrich’s sister, Frieda Hildegarde, married in Sheffield, it was described in the press as social event.   By 1914, Kuehnrich had bought Holly Court mansion in Millhouses Lane.   Kuehnrich’s foreign origins led to him being hounded during the First World War, when rumours spread that he was a per-sonal friend of the Kaiser and drilled a secret army at Holly Court.  

However, once the War had ended, Kuehnrich resumed his grand designs.  He had developed an alloy named ‘cobaltcrom’ for cutlery and safety razors.  He told one newspaper: ‘At Fitzwilliam Works we intend to make cutlery by mass production of a steel that is rustless and stainless, but which has super-cutting qualities.  It can be used for every kind of knife from a table knife to a cook’s knife’ (Tweedale, 1991¹).  The emphasis, though, was on safety razors.  Kuehnrich hoped that his ‘MIRACOL’ razors would dominate world sales.  His ambitions extended to America, where Victor Tlach became the head of Darwin & Milner Inc.  and  Darwin Razor Corporation in Cleveland, Ohio.

A striking figure, with a bushy beard (ironically, he never used a razor!), Kuehnrich kept himself in the public eye with various grand gestures, such as opening his private gardens to the public.  But Darwins Ltd was bankrupted during the General Strike in 1926.   Elise died in that year on 10 May at Hotel Breidenbacher Hof, Dusseldorf, leaving £125.  Darwins was soon re-established as a successful tool steel company, though Kuehnrich was retained only as a consultant.  However, in 1930 he launched the Universal Rustless Steel Corporation, based at Crysteel Works, Coleridge Road (Attercliffe), and Calver Mill in Derbyshire (Sheffield Daily Independent, 30 August 1930).  In 1932, he announced ‘CRYSTEEL’ (pronounced ‘Kriss Steel’), another ‘super-cutting’ stainless alloy for knives, spoons, and forks.  At the start of 1932, Kuehnrich – ever the showman – took out a full-page advertisement in a local newspaper for his ‘Sensational British Discovery’ (Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 26 January 1932).  He claimed his alloy produced a ‘super-keen long-lasting edge’, which was ‘bright as silver, cuts like a razor’.   Table, dessert, bread, and fish knives were designed to be one-piece, with blades and handles made of stainless steel.  

Universal Rustless Steel Corporation was capitalised at £165,000, but further borrowing was needed to keep the venture afloat.  Despite the big advertising ‘push’, the company collapsed almost as soon as it began.  On the morning of 28 April 1932, Kuehnrich shot himself at Holly Court.   The funeral was at Sheffield Crematorium.  He left only £57.  The ‘CRYSTEEL’ mark was acquired by the Firth-Brearley Stainless Steel Syndicate, presumably to take it out of circulation.

Kuehnrich was promptly forgotten by his adopted city and Holly Court was later demolished.   His naturalisation file at the National Archives (kindly consulted for me by Professor David Higgins) contains some interesting papers from the early 1920s, when the Sheffield business community attempted to prevent Kuehnrich’s appointment as an unsalaried Venezuelan consul in Sheffield.   Officials at Sheffield Town Hall told the Foreign Office that Kuehnrich was ‘a most unpopular man in Sheffield … [who] … has very considerable German and Austrian connections, and is the object of very considerable suspicion to the Sheffield Chamber of Commerce and the Cutlers’ Associations.’  No evidence was provided to support these allegations, but Kuehnrich’s appointment was blocked.   Frustratingly, the papers shed no further light on Kuehnrich’s origins and he remains a mystery man.   However, a relative of Paul Kuehnrich – Erik Lonnedhahl in Sweden – has made available (courtesy of Peter Warr) several important Kuehnrich documents.

^1. Tweedale, G, ‘The Razor Blade King of Sheffield: The Forgotten Career of Paul Kuehnrich’, THAS 16 (1991)